Thank you for supporting our publishing ministry. Marilynne Robinson, one of the greatest novelists of our time, returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder. To keep reading, subscribe-subscriptions begin at $4.95-or log in. First glimpsed in Gilead, we see here how Lila meets and. This article is available to Christian Century magazine subscribers only. Lila (FSG) is the story of a stranger’s unmakinga process that, we understand from the outset, will not be without internal violence. She tries to understand this story in light of her new circumstances, and she wonders what of it she will share with Ames.Īt the beginning of the novel, she decides only to tell him sweet things about her past: Throughout the novel, she tells her own story to herself, from the moment that her surrogate mother, Doll, stole her off a porch, through the birth and baptism of her son. Lila grapples with her desire for both freedom and shelter. It is also Ames’s way of acknowledging that she might not stay with him. Lila is the furious outsider, a woman whose hard life is just written all over her face, whose face isn’t pretty, however much they once tried to polish her up in a St Louis whorehouse. Bringing the wind inside.” Lila knows that this is Ames’s way of acknowledging their relationship, the bit of “wind inside” that she is to him.

“It left a blessing in the house,” he told her. Early in Lila, the title character recalls John Ames telling her about a bird that had flown into his house during a storm.

And I felt that I had met Lila in Robinson’s other work, perhaps in the characters of Sylvie and Ruth in Housekeeping, two women torn between homelessness and home, between something wild in themselves that resists domesticity and something that craves shelter. Marilynne Robinson’s readers already know the title character of her new novel, having met Lila twice: once as the mother of John Ames’s son in Gilead, and once as a skeptical but sympathetic presence in Home, the story of Gilead’s Boughton family.

Lila marilynne robinson